The Coyote Way, page 1
part #3 of Vanished Series
To Ayo. Welcome to the family.
“Coyote is always out there waiting, and Coyote is always hungry.”
-Navajo Proverb
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Walker
Chapter 2: Caroline Adams
Chapter 3: Owen Bennet
Chapter 4: The Walker
Chapter 5: Grant Romer
Chapter 6: Caroline Adams
Chapter 7: The Walker
Chapter 8: Grant Romer
Chapter 9: Owen Bennet
Chapter 10: Caroline Adams
Chapter 11: Owen Bennet
Chapter 12: The Walker
Chapter 13: Grant Romer
Chapter 14: Caroline Adams
Chapter 15: Grant Romer
Chapter 16: Owen Bennet
Chapter 17: The Walker
Chapter 18: Caroline Adams
Chapter 19: Grant Romer
Chapter 20: The Walker
Chapter 21: Caroline Adams
Chapter 22: The Walker
Chapter 23: Grant Romer
Chapter 24: Owen Bennet
Chapter 25: Grant Romer
Chapter 26: Caroline Adams
Chapter 27: Owen Bennet
Chapter 28: The Walker
Chapter 29: Owen Bennet
Chapter 30: The Walker
Chapter 31: The Walker
Chapter 32: Owen Bennet
Chapter 33: Grant Romer
Chapter 34: The Walker
Author’s Note
About the Author
Chapter 1
The Walker
There is a room at Green Mesa Psychiatric Hospital in Los Alamos, New Mexico, called the Serenity Room. Attendants deliver medicine in soft whispers, waking dozing patients only when they must. Some patients read, some mutter, some simply sit by the huge bay window that faces the chunky orange cliffs of the Pajarito Plateau. The Serenity Room is a place set outside of the day-to-day, where the driving white noise the world makes as it turns can’t be heard. Where the sick can live out the remainder of their troubled lives undisturbed.
Then I walk in.
I do my job alone—nobody can see me or hear me or touch me—but over the past six years that I’ve walked the soul map, snipping frayed threads and sending the dead through the veil and on their way, I’ve noticed that some people do seem to sense me. For instance, babies don’t much like it when I’m near. They start fussing pretty bad. Everyone in the living world can pass right through me, but once a blind guy in Rome walked around me. I stood there blinking like a sheep while he went on his way. A deaf woman at a call I answered in Reno, Nevada, pricked her ear my way when I was talking to myself. I swear that sometimes the very old can track me with their milky eyes, although I’m not sure they know what they’re looking at. Stuff like that. But by far the most perceptive are the insane.
The two men who were muttering to each other in the corner a second ago? Now they’re crying. The woman who was putting together a puzzle, one that she’s been working on diligently for nearly a year? Now she’s dismantling it piece by piece. The young man who’s been reading the same book over and over again for months? Now he’s ripping the pages out and letting them flutter to the floor. It’s because of me. Because of what I am. I make them uncomfortable when I’m nearby. They’re already half in and half out of the world they live in. They fight every day to cling to whatever frayed strings of sanity they have left, and I’m the type of guy whose job it is to cut threads.
The staff can’t figure out why this happens every so often, and they never will. They can only curse under their breaths and scamper around trying to keep these delicate people from falling apart like dried flowers in a sudden wind. One of these dried flowers, perhaps the most delicate of all, is my mother.
You heard that right. Death has a mom.
Mom sits in a decorative wheelchair with a plump pillow at her back, staring blankly out of the bay window at the soft pink New Mexico sunset. When she left us, not long after Ana died, she cut her long black hair short and spiky. It’s grown out again now, down past her shoulders, and it’s as white as snow. She neglects it, but her attendants don’t. It’s pulled back and banded behind her head with a beaded leather thong. One of the handful of things she kept from her life before. Something Ana made in school. She wears a clean and neat dressing gown of blue and gold, one of several that the staff rotate throughout the week.
She’s not sickly looking, or gaunt. Her skin still has that Navajo cinnamon coloring, even if it’s a bit ruddy at the cheeks. In a lot of ways, she looks just like the woman she was back when we all lived in one half of a little duplex on Chaco rez, about an hour north of Albuquerque. The same woman who bundled Ana and me up for the walk to school, who packed our lunches and washed our clothes. Who helped Gam cook dinner and kept Dad’s drinking at bay. Who tanned my hide when I chipped a tooth racing around the campers out at the Arroyo at dusk, Joey and I weaving in and out, slapping the corrugated metal of each with the flat of our hands and tearing off before we got something chucked at us, laughing like hell. Our twenty-first-century, dirt-poor version of counting coup.
On the outside she looks just like she did back then, just older. Inside, she’s a mess. Many of the patients around her fuss and fidget and mewl as I walk toward her. She takes no notice. Just stares forward until her eyes water and she’s forced to blink.
I come here a lot in between calls, but not because I feel I owe it to Mom. I know that she’s well taken care of at Green Mesa, which is just about the cushiest extended-stay psychiatric hospital in the Southwest. They have cucumber water and lemon water and lime water in the front lobby. Water trickles into little ponds, and fountains burble everywhere. The only people who work harder than the doctors around here are the groundskeepers. The place costs a fortune, but the Navajo Nation is footing Mom’s entire bill. Medical costs, room and board, extra expenses, the whole thing. The Council took pity on her after she lost everyone. With the Navajo, you take your mother’s clan. The Dejooli branch of our clan is going to end with her. It sucks, but in a twisted way it’s kind of fitting. Dejooli is Navajo for up in the air. I always took it to mean gone.
So Mom hasn’t paid a dime since the day she got here, almost six years ago now. Good thing too. Mom’s broke. But worse than that, she no longer has the wherewithal to pay anything anyway. I don’t even think she knows where she is anymore. The day Ana disappeared, Mom started to fade. She backed away from Chaco, and eventually from the Navajo Way altogether. I found Ana, eventually, right as I died. Turns out she was the one who came for me, to take me away, just like I’m the one who will one day come for you. Except I rang a special bell, took her job, and set her free. Mom was already cracked, but when she saw that happen, it broke her.
I take a seat next to her, away from the rest of the patients, who start to settle now that I’ve settled myself and it turns out I’m not coming for them. I’m barely taller than her, and only slightly thicker. Danny Ninepoint, my old partner back at the Navajo Nation Police Department, used to say that I have tricky muscles, which was his way of saying I look like a wuss but somehow could still hold up my end of a fight. I still wear an NNPD uniform, but it’s all black now. It looks out of place, here. I think there’s some sort of rule against the color black at Green Mesa.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, knowing full well she won’t answer. She continues to stare out of the window. Her right finger twitches a little. I cross my arms and watch as a murder of crows spans the horizon, flying away. It’s midsummer. Not crow season in this part of the country. But lately the crows have been gathering anyway. Which is never a good sign.
When Mom first came to Green Mesa she didn’t need a wheelchair. She was in a state of shock from losing her family, but she was functional. She even showed signs of getting better. She made a few friends, spoke to each of the attendants and doctors by name, had a few lunch dates at the fancy buffet, but then, just about a year after her arrival, she started going downhill. Stopped smiling, then stopped talking. She eventually stopped eating on her own, and then stopped walking. The doctors are at a loss, but I’m not.
Right around the time she started to withdraw, a turquoise knife nearly ripped a hole in the fabric between our worlds. Caroline, Owen, Grant, and I managed to shore it up, but not before something came through. I think she felt it. As whatever it is grows in strength, she is weakening.
It is some form of chaos. That’s all I know. Since it broke through into the land of the living, it’s disappeared, but I think it has some sort of connection with sick people like her. Broken minds are attuned to it. My mother more than most. She’s had more exposure to my line of work than your average mental patient. Hell, both of her children ended up as Walkers. She was there when the bell rang and I started my watch. She shares my blood. So you see, I have an ulterior motive here. These visits aren’t just one-sided social calls. Mom is a canary in a coal mine.
I look over at her again. Her pointer finger is twitching still, more like scratching now. I try to put my hand over it, to calm it. I pass right through her. Her eyes water, and she blinks free a rivulet of tears. It rolls down her cheek. I try to brush it, but my finger cannot touch her.
“I know, Mom. I can feel it too. Whatever’s been simmering for the past five years is about to come to a boil. The chaos thing, the Dark Walker, it’s making its move, but I can’t find it. Chaco can’t find it. Nobody can find it.”
I watch the crows wheel and float in the distance like a flock of sta
When I turn back to Mom, she’s looking right at me. I nearly jump up from my seat. Her finger is still. Her eyes are focused. The canary senses something coming from the deeps of the mine.
“Go home, Ben,” she whispers in Navajo.
I reach for her again, my hands shaking. These are the first words she’s spoken in years, and the first Navajo words I can ever remember her voluntarily speaking. I reach out as if I could grab them, maybe keep them in my pocket. She still looks at me.
“Go home,” she says again. She uses the old Navajo word Bikeyah, which means homeland. The place of my people. Then she turns slowly to the window again, where the crows have disappeared into the gloaming.
“Mom?” I ask. “Mom, can you hear me?” I repeat myself again in Navajo. Nothing. Her face is blank once more. But my canary has spoken, and moments later I get a tug from the soul map. I stand and swirl it open then turn back to her. My mind races. These things are connected. I raise my hand in a farewell she’s blind to, then I step through.
I walk the rope of intertwined souls, looking for the break that calls me, looking for the dimming of a life that needs to be set free. I see it, like a flickering bulb in a sea of warm light. I step up to it, swirl the map open once more, and by this time I have a pretty good hunch about where I’m going to step out. It’s the why that I can’t figure.
The day is coming to a close, but the desert is still hot under foot. It creaks a little, like a massive settling house, with the roof open to a sky that goes on forever. It smells like baked clay and untouched wind. It smells like home.
I’m back on the rez.
Chapter 2
Caroline Adams
I’m about the last girl on earth you’d pick as having a little black book. Seriously. You could count on one hand the number of guys I’ve hooked up with, and you wouldn’t need your thumb. To be fair, I’m not exactly hitting the scene these days. I hang out in an RV with two people most of the time, and one of them is a fourteen-year-old kid with a bird for a best friend. The other is Owen Bennet. If what I carried actually was a little black book, his name would be the only entry on any of the pages for the past five years, which would make it less of a “little black book” and more of a “penmanship exercise,” but like I said, what I carry isn’t a little black book.
Sure, it looks like one. It’s small, thin, and bound in black leather (or at least what I really hope is black leather), but it’s also a key. A clue. A map. Some sort of Rosetta stone that can help explain what came through to our world when the barriers broke down all those years ago. The cover says The Book of the Dark Walker. Ben is called the Walker too. What I’m really hoping is that somewhere inside I’ll find a little bit about Ben Dejooli, about how his world works, maybe even how I can reach him. I don’t tell Owen about this last part, of course, but I don’t have to. He knows. And it makes me feel like a bad person.
“Does that make me a bad person?” I ask James Parsons, heretofore Agent Parsons and now of AJ’s Villa, a four-star bed-and-breakfast on the West Sound of Orcas Island in upstate Washington. It’s a bit of a bear to get here, if you’re not traveling by crow. That’s exactly why James and Allen chose it.
“Well, it doesn’t make you a great person,” James says. He’s setting the breakfast table. It looks like they have two couples staying with them.
“It’s not my fault I’m the type of girl who needs closure. Ben and I shared something that changed me, but he died before I could figure it out,” I say, flopping down on one of their puffy living-room chairs that face the bay.
“Did you just blame a guy for dying of cancer?” James asks. He adjusts the alignment of a fork.
I put my head in my hands. “God. Maybe I really am a bad person.”
“Don’t listen to him, Caroline,” Allen chirps from the kitchen. I hear the sizzling of eggs and bacon and the clunk of the oven door opening and closing. “He’s just grumpy. It’s completely normal to take five years to figure out where your heart lies.”
I hear the glugluglug of coffee being poured. Allen Douglas comes around the corner with two mugs. He uses neutral cover-up to mask the light-pink scarring that Chaco left on his face back when Allen was trying to kill all of us. He’s gained weight since then too. Happy weight. He holds one cup out to me.
“I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.” I take a sip. The mug is a ceramic pineapple. The decor here is a little too tropical for my tastes. The San Juan Islands always struck me as more hot toddy while AJ’s is clearly channeling mai tai. But their coffee is outstanding, and Allen is a heck of a cook, and the view ain’t bad, either. I watch the sunrise over the choppy waters of the sound, always hoping to see an actual orca. I haven’t seen one yet, but I do see lots of crows. Even way out here. I phase over here sometimes when living in an RV day after day with Owen and Grant starts to grate on me. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guys, but Owen is too bright to be as bored as he is, and Grant is… well, Grant is fourteen.
“I am being serious,” Allen says, sitting down for a moment then getting right back up when something dings in the kitchen. “Just look at the two of us. This took five years,” he says over his shoulder.
“That doesn’t count. You were in a fugue state,” I say.
“I’m just saying,” he calls back.
“Have you at least gotten rid of that disgusting book?” James asks, turning to look at me. I reach involuntarily to my jacket pocket. He notices.
“Caroline Adams,” James says, in a remarkable imitation of my mother. “What did I tell you about bringing that thing into our house?”
“It’s not gonna hurt you. It doesn’t do anything. That’s the problem.”
“You mean besides push you and Owen apart? When it’s not brainwashing people?” He lowers his voice and glances toward the kitchen. These two hate the book, with good reason. They were following it when they broke through beyond the veil, but whatever they saw in it has been wiped away, along with their memories. Allen in particular is terrified of it. He has the scars as souvenirs.
“I can’t just throw it away,” I whisper. “It’s says it’s the Book of the Dark Walker. What if it helps us catch that thing that came through?”
“It’s blank inside, Caroline. Has been for five years,” James whispers. “Whatever we were reading, it’s gone.”
“What if it comes back?”
“If you ask me, I think you’re less interested in finding whatever came though and more interested in seeing if it’ll tell you how to find a certain Walker in particular. One named Ben Dejooli.”
I can’t claim otherwise, so I hide behind a big sip of coffee. I dream sometimes that it’s a two-way journal. That I write things in it and they go to the other side and Ben can read them, and that Ben can write things in it that I can read. Things about that last kiss we shared before he died. Or the time our fingertips touched through the thin place. Chaco says the agents followed it like a map when they were beyond the veil. A map can lead to a lot of things. Maybe even to Ben.
“Are you two whispering?” Allen asks, bringing out steaming bread in a covered basket in one hand and a plate of food in the other. James turns back to the place settings. I prolong my sip of coffee.
“This is about that awful book, isn’t it?” Allen asks primly, setting the bread basket down with a bit more force than necessary. “We already told you we can’t read it. I don’t even remember carrying it. It’s blank to us too, and God willing it will stay that way forever.”
“I’m sorry Allen. I just…”
“Can’t let it go. I know. But be careful. That’s how it starts.” Allen pats my shoulder kindly. “Now eat. Before the guests come down and we have to explain you away. You look thin.”
